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Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Weekend: June 4th & 5th

I ended up playing more this weekend than I expected, as The
Tomorrow Children beta sort of came out of nowhere (for me anyway). In my
periphery it always looked like an interesting game but I’m surprised at how much the mood grabbed me when I saw it would be in open beta last weekend. I always tend to hit a wall when it comes to Minecraft-lites or even something as laid back as
Animal Crossing. I enjoy them certainly, but there’s a distinct ceiling I hit where everything becomes drab and tedious. The Tomorrow
Children seems like the first one of these that I’d actually stick with long
term, but also something I could very leisurely jump in and out of on a whim. I
spent probably ten hours playing this weekend (which is nine more than I
expected to), and the big determining factors for whether or not I’ll actually
commit to it lies on one thing...

That is whether or not it will ditch its Dark Souls-like
player interaction obstacle.

The game’s backdrop is more or less predicated on the notion
of the player(s) adopting this kind of darkly humorous take on communism as
they run about. It’s much like Minecraft in that the first few hours offer you
nothing but confusion as you venture about chopping down trees and mining minerals from very abstract structures
while Godzilla-like monsters freely roam around in the expanse as the game’s
primary threat. Much of what it does isn’t exactly unique (ignoring the game’s
setting and look of course), but the way the pieces come together offer it some
individuality. This Dark Souls like feature is one of those
pieces, opting to separate players running around in a certain vicinity, limiting
their exposure to one another. For the most part you’ll rarely see other
players for more than a couple of seconds, but you’ll constantly see and feel
their effect on the world around you.

Boxes and tools you drop vanish right out from under you and
minerals you toss down get passed around on the way back to the city. On paper
this sounds much cooler than it actually is and for the first couple of hours
it’s fascinating to watch. Clinging to this however will immediately turn me
off as it constantly gets in the way of effectively interacting with people in
your city. This is not a deftly woven mechanic either, it’s just annoying. It
begins to bleed into everything that makes the game fun to play for extended
periods of time. It actively makes co-operating with fellow clones (everybody
looks like the same little Russian girl) a chore.

The game is at its best is when you have 20-30 people all
working as a single machine, as even the smallest role someone commits to will
help the town overall in the long run. I went from venturing out into the void
to mine and explore to sitting around in the city and helping organize what
other players brought back from that same trek. With the former being a much
more involved process than the latter, there’s actually quite a few fluid roles
people can dedicate themselves towards and they can swap around in these almost
seamlessly. The Souls-Echo (let’s call it that for now) however counteracts
that, giving the player a very tenuous grasp on the community and making the
game feel more like a flash-in-the-pan social experiment than anything else (admittedly,
it becomes far more interesting to me in that regard but far less valuable to
me as a game).

I’m definitely interested to see when and how this game
makes its final debut, but that one feature is currently stopping me from
investing too much mind-space in it for the time being.

The other thing I’ve been playing is the Witcher 3’s latest
(and final) expansion, Blood and Wine. From buying it on PS4 to PC with all its
DLC on both platforms, I’ve been kind of a silent champion of it for the past year.[1]
I am sitting on a much longer post dedicated to it (might be my next post?), but for right now I do feel the
need to mention that when taken as a whole, the Witcher series is probably the
most impressive thing I’ve seen in some time. I continually bounced off the first two games until last year when I
finally gritted my teeth and ran roughshod through them in preparation for The
Wild Hunt. The result was a perspective on a world and series I begrudgingly came
to love, but also one I’m highly critical of as well (and I'd have it no other way). From how accurately CDPR adapted
the world and characters from the books (which I also managed to find time to
throw myself into last year) to the miraculous leap the series made between the
first entry and its third, it’s small miracle to behold and look back on now.

It’s also a damn impressive game on its own.

My replay
of 3 and both its DLCs were mostly focused getting through the main storylines
and saving all the sidequests and extraneous stuff for a later time, so I can
really sit back and lose myself in it. Pre-Hearts of Stone already saw me
nearly platinum the game on Playstation 4 at around 200 hours (I ignored Gwent
to save myself time but did pretty much everything else). It’s been long enough now to where
I can do all that stuff again, in addition to the mountain things the two DLCs
added and just have the game go almost indefinitely in small marathon sessions. I adopted the playstyle of
turning off the minimap, cranking things up to Death March and just wandering around
until I found stuff. At first I thought this would be a terrible ordeal as I’ve
always had issues with this series’s combat, but it actually turned out to be
one the most engrossing things I’ve done in a game in a very long time. When
you take into account how well the sidequests and smaller-scale encounters are
written in The Wild Hunt (something the Witcher as an entire property excels
at), it’s an easy thing to just forget about because you may not have the time
to dedicate to all of it.

The final two things I dipped myself in was Hitman’s latest
DLC and considering the new Pokemon generation, Sun and Moon. The former is
probably the first real title to take a run at that the episodic form I’ve been
craving for years[2]. Even stuff that seemingly may not fit the format could
work excellently if thoughtfully considered and I’m glad Hitman has been
nailing it in each episode.

Pokemon however, really highlighted that I should rarely
break free of the restraints I’ve set up for myself. I consistently get
franchise fatigue with every third generation released, but I broke form with
generation six (X & Y) and wound up kind of hating it (seriously, I can’t
tell you one fucking thing that happened in X and I completed it), which means
I have to skip Sun and Moon entirely. Just considering playing either of them
right now is like staring a full plate of food after already stuffing myself.

Final Fantasy XIV's 3.3 patch and Mirror's Edge are currently on my docket for the coming week, along with continued in-and-out of Blood and Wine. After that my summer will be relatively clean until Mankind Divided in August. 1. It was actually the title that impressed me the
most last year, even moreso than Bloodborne. Its first paid DLC, Hearts of
Stone is what really threw things in its favor for me (which I very much
adored). This was in stark contrast to Bloodborne’s DLC which left me on the
whole very much unimpressed and sort of annoyed---but that's for another time.

2. While more games that can fall into the “adventure”
category do count here (e.g. stuff like Telltale and Life is Strange), things more removed from that genre have really tackled it in quite this manner. It’s the first thing that scratched
the itch I felt back in ’09: http://www.snakelinksonic.com/2009/02/cowboys-and-demons.html